Happy Earth Day!
Cedar Waxwings perched in Amherst State Park, NY (21)
New Eugenics: The Continuing Saga of HeLa Cells
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the Sequel”, NY Times Last week, scientists sequenced the genome of cells taken without consent from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. She was a black tobacco farmer and mother of five, and though she died in 1951, her cells, code-named HeLa, live on. They…
Human Evolution Enters an Exciting New Phase
From Wired: If you could escape the human time scale for a moment, and regard evolution from the perspective of deep time, in which the last 10,000 years are a short chapter in a long saga, you’d say: Things are pretty wild right now. In the most massive study of…
Happy bday! SMS txt msgs turn 20
From ComputerWorld: In the fast moving world of technology, there are perhaps few things that have proved as resistant to change as the simple SMS text message. While a dizzying number of options exist today to interconnect people, the text message remains a 160 character deliverer of news, gossip, laughs,…
The Most Important Image Ever Taken
“I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.” ― Carl Sagan (13)
NASA Spacecraft Detects Radio Emissions Coming from Our Own Planet
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Nearly Half of American Adults Are Smartphone Owners
From Pew Internet: Nearly half (46%) of American adults are smartphone owners as of February 2012, an increase of 11 percentage points over the 35% of Americans who owned a smartphone last May. Two in five adults (41%) own a cell phone that is not a smartphone, meaning that smartphone…